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Monthly dividend & portfolio update – March 2017

What a month. So many things have happened, both financially and personally. We just got back from a 2-week vacation. So what do you do when you’re home? Writing this dividend report over the past month, of course!

I haven’t spent much time checking up on the markets. Which was a bit strange at the beginning, since I was used to checking it every day… In the end, it doesn’t even matter. And from here on I will hopefully feel the urge less often than before.

When you’re not focussed on the markets, or investing whatsoever for a couple of weeks. It’s great to see you’re still getting some of those dividends. Our year on year growth was great and even higher than February. March was also the month we received our first 3 digit dividend income for this year.

But there is more news on the financial side. The past month Mr. divnomics and I both got our salary increases. Which will boost our ability to save and invest. And allocate a bit more money every month for our portfolio or other savings.

On a personal level, I’m happy to share with you all that we got engaged during our stay in the US! Apparently, millennials are spending a lot of money on weddings nowadays, so we have to make sure we are not following this trend. We’ve decided to plan it somewhere next year, so we have plenty of time to arrange everything and come up with some additional savings. The income increase helps a lot in this situation…

Luckily for us, our dividends continue to grow, and we are actually in a great financial position which just continues to grow bit by bit.

In March we received dividends of 10 different companies. Adding up to a total of €156.12. There are 5 companies in our portfolio, that weren’t there at the same time last year. And 1 that we actually got rid off. Not a company though, but a tracker following the Dutch Stock exchange, the iShares AEX. This was one of the first investments we made when we started but didn’t really fit our renewed DGI strategy. So we sold it somewhere last year.

As an end of a quarter month, returns are always a bit brighter than other months.

Our year on year dividend growth resulted in a 71% increase. And got us into the three digits result the first time this year.

The high growth of the Gilead dividends is because after we received the dividends last year we added more shares of this company. Last year in the same month we owned 23 shares, now that number has grown to 51.

As for the decrease in the dividends in Shell, this was because of the form of payment. Last year we chose to get paid a stock dividend, whereas we now got paid a cash dividend. Taxes are handled differently which changed the net result of our dividends.

The numbers you see above are all in net income, so taxes are already being paid. The nice thing about this is that some of the dividend tax we pay, at least for Dutch companies, we can get back via our tax application. We are a bit late with the application this year and expect to get some money back in June this year.

Steps going forward

We bought no new shares for the last couple of months, partially because of unforeseen costs due to switching to a new brokerage, and partially because we weren’t getting around to it. We currently have our eyes on CVS and V.F. Corp.

For the coming month(s) we will also focus on adding some new positions in ETF’s. Why? Because we wanted to add some more diversification and build up some money which would have higher returns than our savings account. This money we can use to pay off our debts in the longer term. Earlier I wrote that the debt interest on our student loans is far lower than our possible investment return. So we stalled our payments for 5 years and instead invest this money in trackers. The plan is to start paying off our debts 5 years from now in an exponential way.

Furthermore, we have some intentions to get into real estate. Since we’ve read multiple blogs on how others do it, we’re willing to make the jump as well. The one downside: we need money to fund it. That’s no surprise. We don’t want to sell any stocks to fund it though, so we aim to lower our monthly investment amount we save automatically in order to get the funds we need for real estate. By doing this we will be able to continue buying stocks, and build up the money we need for real estate. This will take some time though. But will also mean we can keep saving for non-investment projects, like the wedding.

We’re no experts in rental properties (yet). So, we will read, talk and learn as much as we can on rental properties, in combination to Dutch regulations. That sounds like fun!

So, overall it was a great month, with lots of positive financial growth and some great personal experiences we’ve gained, or are yet to come.

We’ve now been almost 3 years ‘working’ on investing. And it’s amazing to see how every month it grows a little larger. It’s motivating to see when all of this will proof it’s worth. Especially seeing so many other succeed as well.

Hope you all had a great month as well, maybe even broken some records? Who knows. Share your thoughts below, it’s very much appreciated.

First of all, congrats. I’m happy you found a partner you wish to spend your life with. Enjoy the time. Second, awesome income update with a tremendous year over year gain. That has to feel good seeing those types of results. Just shows you are headed in the right direction. VFC still looks good at current levels though it has bounced back quite a bit from its recent lows. Keep up the good work.